NIX ET NOX.
The characteristic of the snowstorm is its blackness. Nature’s habitual
aspect during a storm, the earth or sea black and the sky pale, is
reversed; the sky is black, the ocean white, foam below, darkness
above; a horizon walled in with smoke; a zenith roofed with crape. The
tempest resembles a cathedral hung with mourning, but no light in that
cathedral: no phantom lights on the crests of the waves, no spark, no
phosphorescence, naught but a huge shadow. The polar cyclone differs
from the tropical cyclone, inasmuch as the one sets fire to every light,
and the other extinguishes them all. The world is suddenly converted
into the arched vault of a cave. Out of the night falls a dust of pale
spots, which hesitate between sky and sea. These spots, which are flakes
of snow, slip, wander, and flow. It is like the tears of a winding-sheet
putting themselves into lifelike motion. A mad wind mingles with this
dissemination. Blackness crumbling into whiteness, the furious into the
obscure, all the tumult of which the sepulchre is capable, a whirlwind
under a catafalque--such is the snowstorm. Underneath trembles the
ocean, forming and re-forming over portentous unknown depths.
In the polar wind, which is electrical, the flakes turn suddenly into
hailstones, and the air becomes filled with projectiles; the water
crackles, shot with grape.
No thunderstrokes: the lightning of boreal storms is silent. What is
sometimes said of the cat, “it swears,” may be applied to this
lightning. It is a menace proceeding from a mouth half open and
strangely inexorable. The snowstorm is a storm blind and dumb; when it
has passed, the ships also are often blind and the sailors dumb.
To escape from such an abyss is difficult.
It would be wrong, however, to believe shipwreck to be absolutely
inevitable. The Danish fishermen of Disco and the Balesin; the seekers
of black whales; Hearn steering towards Behring Strait, to discover the
mouth of Coppermine River; Hudson, Mackenzie, Vancouver, Ross, Dumont
D’Urville, all underwent at the Pole itself the wildest hurricanes, and
escaped out of them.
It was into this description of tempest that the hooker had entered,
triumphant and in full sail--frenzy against frenzy. When Montgomery,
escaping from Rouen, threw his galley, with all the force of its oars,
against the chain barring the Seine at La Bouille, he showed similar
effrontery.
The _Matutina_ sailed on fast; she bent so much under her sails that at
moments she made a fearful angle with the sea of fifteen degrees; but
her good bellied keel adhered to the water as if glued to it. The keel
resisted the grasp of the hurricane. The lantern at the prow cast its
light ahead.
The cloud, full of winds, dragging its tumour over the deep, cramped and
eat more and more into the sea round the hooker. Not a gull, not a
sea-mew, nothing but snow. The expanse of the field of waves was
becoming contracted and terrible; only three or four gigantic ones were
visible.
Now and then a tremendous flash of lightning of a red copper colour
broke out behind the obscure superposition of the horizon and the
zenith; that sudden release of vermilion flame revealed the horror of
the clouds; that abrupt conflagration of the depths, to which for an
instant the first tiers of clouds and the distant boundaries of the
celestial chaos seemed to adhere, placed the abyss in perspective. On
this ground of fire the snow-flakes showed black--they might have been
compared to dark butterflies flying about in a furnace--then all was
extinguished.
The first explosion over, the squall, still pursuing the hooker, began
to roar in thorough bass. This phase of grumbling is a perilous
diminution of uproar. Nothing is so terrifying as this monologue of the
storm. This gloomy recitative appears to serve as a moment of rest to
the mysterious combating forces, and indicates a species of patrol kept
in the unknown.
The hooker held wildly on her course. Her two mainsails especially were
doing fearful work. The sky and sea were as of ink with jets of foam
running higher than the mast. Every instant masses of water swept the
deck like a deluge, and at each roll of the vessel the hawse-holes, now
to starboard, now to larboard, became as so many open mouths vomiting
back the foam into the sea. The women had taken refuge in the cabin, but
the men remained on deck; the blinding snow eddied round, the spitting
surge mingled with it. All was fury.
At that moment the chief of the band, standing abaft on the stern
frames, holding on with one hand to the shrouds, and with the other
taking off the kerchief he wore round his head and waving it in the
light of the lantern, gay and arrogant, with pride in his face, and his
hair in wild disorder, intoxicated by all the darkness, cried out,--
“We are free!”
“Free, free, free,” echoed the fugitives, and the band, seizing hold of
the rigging, rose up on deck.
“Hurrah!” shouted the chief.
And the band shouted in the storm,--
“Hurrah!”
Just as this clamour was dying away in the tempest, a loud solemn voice
rose from the other end of the vessel, saying,--
“Silence!”
All turned their heads. The darkness was thick, and the doctor was
leaning against the mast so that he seemed part of it, and they could
not see him.
The voice spoke again,--
“Listen!”
All were silent.
Then did they distinctly hear through the darkness the toll of a bell.